Learning from Labor
June 22, 2024

The slogan of the college where I went, Oberlin, was “Learning and Labor.” Originally the college was founded with the idea that students would study their books in the morning and then go out and work in the fields in the afternoons—to learn to be well-rounded individuals. We can take that slogan and adjust it a little bit to make it a slogan for the Buddha’s teachings: “Learning from Labor.” In other words, you do the work of the training in terms of virtue, concentration, and discernment, and in the doing you’re going to learn a lot about the mind, a lot about how you’re causing suffering, and also about how you don’t have to. But you have to do it. As the Buddha said, he points out the way. It’s up to us to follow the way.

We don’t just follow it in terms of following the rules or following the instructions with a guaranteed result coming out the other end. We have to be very watchful as we tread along the path to see what we’re doing. Remember how the Buddha said that the Dhamma is nourished, the Dhamma grows, because of commitment and reflection. You commit yourself to the path and then you reflect on what you’re doing. That’s where the learning comes.

As when you’re doing concentration: You try to learn which ways of breathing feel good for the body. I’ve had people ask me what kind of breathing is best, and the answer is that you have to figure out for yourself what your body needs right now. What it needs right now may not be what it needs tomorrow, or even at the end of the hour. You have to be on top of what kind of breathing feels good each time you breathe: what kind of feelings you can create by the way you breathe, different feelings of pleasure in different parts of the body. When you have a feeling of pleasure, how do you spread it around?

Think of the image of the bathman kneading water through the dough of the bath powder he’s trying to create. How do you do that in a way that you’re not forcing things too much, one where you allow things to flow? When you force the breath too much—even though it starts out comfortable—the fact that you’re squeezing it too much or pushing it too much turns it into something else. This is a skill you have to learn by observing on your own: What perceptions of the breath, what perceptions of the body, what perceptions of where you are in the body right now in relationship to the breath, are most conducive to getting the mind to settle down?

We talk about watching the breath, and sometimes that’s an unfortunate image. It’s as if you’re up here in your head looking down at the breath in the body. What works much better is to think of the whole body, from the head on down, being bathed in the breath. You feel the breath; you wear the breath. What does that perception do? If it doesn’t do much, what perceptions will help? And as you’re talking to yourself about the breath, how much talking is enough, how much is too much? This commentator you have inside, how do you train it so that it’s actually helpful on the path?

Again, I’ve had people asking me, “What is this directed thought and evaluation I’m supposed to be doing?” Well, you’re doing it all the time. It’s the way you talk to yourself, the way you prepare sentences in the mind. So the real question, if you tend to talk to yourself in a toxic way, is: How do you learn to unlearn that toxic kind of conversation and get the inner voices more helpful?

And your consciousness: Where do you focus your attention? How do you create a consciousness that fills the whole body and yet is well anchored?

These are things you have to explore from within. And as you explore them from within, you begin to see that this is how you create mental states, this is how you create physical states, in general. You become more sensitive as you go through the day to the different ways in which you create a mental state or a physical state. You get to become a better judge of what kind of states are worth creating, which ones are not. Because in developing your powers of judgment, that’s what the reflection is for—to gain a sense of where the effort is well spent and where it’s not well spent.

All this is meant to develop your powers of discernment of the fact that the state of concentration is constructed. In the beginning, that’s good news. You learn how to create a state of well-being in the mind and you learn how to do it in more and more circumstances. We start out in relatively ideal circumstances, where it’s quiet, where there are no disturbances. Even though it’s a little bit warm today, it’s not so oppressive that you can’t meditate. You learn to take the warmth in stride. If the mind is commenting on the warmth, you can say, “Commenting on the warmth doesn’t help. It doesn’t make it go away. It actually makes it a more prominent part of your awareness.” Can you leave the warmth alone? Like Ajaan Chah’s old statement that, if there are noises in the background, “The noises are not disturbing you. You’re disturbing the noises.” In the same way, the heat is not disturbing you. You’re disturbing the heat. Learn to think in that way.

So we start in relatively ideal circumstances and then we learn how to master this skill in other circumstances as well, so that we can tap into it when we need it. And we see how we’ve constructed it out of form, feeling, perceptions, fabrications, consciousness.

Then we can get the mind into very subtle states, so that you can drop the directed thought and evaluation, and just be with the sense of oneness—body, awareness, breath, a feeling of pleasure—all one, filling the whole body. Whatever sense of rapture there is after a while becomes too much—something of a burden. You want something calmer, more refined. You realize that there’s a more refined level of energy in the body that you can focus on.

It’s like tuning your radio. The radio waves for hard rock are going through the air right now. The radio waves for classical music, big bombastic classical music, and more calming classical music: They’re all going through the air right now. Which ones are you going to tune into?

It’s the same in the mind, in the body. There are many different levels of energy flowing through the body, so which ones are you going to tune into? You want something more calm? It’s there. As things calm down and the breath energy stays full in the body, you get to the point where you don’t feel the need to breathe. There’s just awareness filling the body, all very still. Then from there you can go to the formless attainments.

It’s all happening right here. And you begin to realize the extent to which you’re creating this. There will come a point, though, where the mind begins incline to something that doesn’t have to be created. You see that in order to maintain this concentration, it takes work. The work gets subtler, that’s true, but wouldn’t it be even better not to have to do anything at all? What would that be like? The mind can incline to something that’s not laborious, not fabricated. That’s how the practice of right concentration leads to awakening. You learn by doing. You learn from your labor.

So when you hear that scientists are studying the brainwaves of people who enter into right concentration—or what they claim to be right concentration—hoping to be able to replicate those brainwave patterns for other people, you realize that they’ve got it backwards. Remember the Buddha said, “The mind is the forerunner of all experience.” It’s how you experience it from within: That’s what initiates all this. The brainwaves are a side effect. The scientists are operating under the principle that you’re starting with physical phenomena, and what you experience in the mind is a side effect, a more passive, receptive side. The physical part is what’s doing the work. But, when you’re sitting here, you’re not experiencing it as brainwaves; you’re experiencing it as images, as feelings, thoughts, your sense of the body. You’re working from this side.

And by seeing what needs to be done, by seeing that this is a task that you’re assigned to yourself, that’s how you learn from it. If some machine can do the brainwaves for you, you’re not going to learn anything. It just becomes another pleasant experience, a mental buzz, which people can then add to their other pleasant experiences without really learning anything. Actually, it’s in the doing that you learn. It’s in the commitment to doing this well that you can reflect—and reflect well. So, have a strong sense that this is something you want to do so that you can learn from it.

The Buddha said that concentration does function as a pleasant abiding. It’s a nice place to hang out, but that’s not all it does. For it to do more, though, you have to approach it as something you’ve learned to master from within as you’re directly experiencing it. You get more sensitive as you get better at it, and your sense of what’s a worthwhile pleasure gets more refined. It’s in the refinement that you develop that sense of disenchantment, ultimately, that no matter how good the concentration is, it still has to be maintained. There’s no point where you can just abide.

If concentration is all you’re doing, you’re going to need some discernment, the discernment that opens things up. That can come only from within, as a result of seeing what you’re doing and getting more and more perceptive about what you’re doing and the results you’re getting.

That’s how concentration acts as a basis for mindfulness, as a basis for supernatural powers, as a basis for getting rid of the effluents. Where do the effluents come from? They come from within the mind, as you directly experience them. You don’t experience them as brain waves. You experience them as the force with which you do things. It’s only by really understanding that force that you get the disenchantment, followed by the dispassion, that leads to release.

It’s our passion for fabricating things: That’s what we’re trying to learn about. Our desire and passion to do these things: You want to get so good at it that you no longer feel any desire or passion for any kind of aggregates at all. But notice: The Buddha said it’s not that you’re going to abandon the aggregates; you abandon the desire and passion. The only way you’re going to do that is to develop a sense of enough. And, the only way you’re going to have a sense of enough is if you’re really clear about what you’re doing.

So don’t hope for some machine to do the work for you. You have to learn from your own labor.